EDUCATIONAL APPROACHES OF THE ROMANIAN MASIM RESEARCH PROJECT

MASIM - Multi-Agent Aerial System with Portable Ground Station for Information Management, was projected and developed for spatial information data gathering using a Multi-Agent Aerial System coordinated by a Portable Ground Station. Nowadays, aerial missions without pilot and their possible missions registering a great evolution. They can respond to every type of applications and missions that classical airplanes can do and even extend them to dangerous missions like: support in fighting fires, search rescues, solving crisis situations in busy locations, etc.

MASIM was designed to be suitable for surveillance purposes which imply presentation of position and other data transferred during flight. MASIM system is composed of: APM (ArduPilot Mega, an UAV with autopilot, which means it supports both piloted and fully autonomous flight, including GPS waypoints, camera control, auto takeoff and landing), ODROID-U3 (the image processing unit, a powerful credit card size Linux computer) and GCS (Ground Controlled Station composed of 2 PC’s, one for supporting the command, control and monitoring of the UAV flight in real time and providing the flight management of the UAV and the other for receiving the processed target images from ODROID-U3).

The educational approaches of MASIM consists of: measuring pressure, temperature and humidity at different altitudes in order to verify their dependencies with altitude and tracking the altitude of a drone or another UAV by using some known sensors like pressure sensor with Raspberry Pi micro controller and radio transmission of gathered data. This kind of approaches is dedicated to motivate students for learning Physics and Science.